Following the acquisition of Power ON in 2023 and Fiplana, as a planning solution for Qlik, in 2024, both by insightsoftware, this is now the third vendor to be acquired that integrates planning functionality into leading reporting platforms. This is a sign that what was originally an exotic approach – integrating planning functionality into platforms not initially designed for it – has now become an attractive and growing niche in the CPM market.
Acterys was one of the pioneers for planning in Power BI. At the first edition of the BARC webinar series on “Planning in Power BI” in 2021, Acterys was already present alongside Power ON, ValQ, and Jedox as the only “traditional” CPM vendor at the time. The number of vendors in this segment has grown significantly in the meantime. Companies such as Aimplan, K4 Solutions, Lumel, Virtivity, and smartPM.solutions offer products on different data platforms and use Power BI as a front end. Several products are also available on the market in the Qlik ecosystem from vendors such as insightsoftware, vizlib, inphinity, and Leitart, also for Tableau write-back solutions are available from vendors like M2 or K4.
Acterys was founded in Australia in 2017 and signed a license agreement with Microsoft’s Dynamics Division in 2024. One of the planning solutions now offered under the Dynamics umbrella is based on components from Acterys. This significantly increased the company’s visibility in the market.
Vena was founded in Toronto, Canada, in 2011 and, with over 800 employees, serves the market for FP&A with a focus on medium-sized businesses. Like Acterys, the company is very Microsoft-heavy in terms of technology, with Excel playing a central role as the front end for planning and forecasting.
Does the combination make sense?
From our point of view, yes: both companies are firmly anchored in the Microsoft ecosystem, focus on medium-sized scenarios, and the strengths of the Acterys components significantly expand Vena’s offering towards the use of Power BI for various operational and FP&A use cases. Although Vena already integrated Power BI into its product, the focus there was on reporting and analysis, not data entry.
Combining the two solutions means that Excel and Power BI can be considered equally strong options for planning front ends, which significantly expands Vena’s offering for Microsoft Fabric and Power BI-heavy customers. Acterys also brings a stronger footprint in continental Europe, while Vena has been primarily successful in North America and UK to date. All in all, this is an acquisition with many logical reasons.
Impact on the market
This step brings the option of using the leading reporting platform Power BI for data entry and planning a little closer to the mainstream and gives it greater visibility in the market. In addition, both Microsoft and Qlik have announced the availability of technical data write-back in their platforms and have launched initial versions on the market last year. Even if these do not directly address use cases such as FP&A, this also strengthens the plausibility of combining planning and reporting in the leading platforms.
Overall, this topic touches on a long-standing debate in the data and analytics market: How closely are planning and reporting linked? The question of whether CPM is part of the D&A market (former: business intelligence) has been discussed repeatedly for many years. BARC has had a clear view on this since its inception and has always considered CPM to be an integral part of D&A.
We see market developments confirming our view: The fact that third-party providers are adding data entry capabilities to analytics tools, and that the manufacturers of these tools are now offering this capability themselves, underscores the demand for this integration and functionality among users. This demand is mainly driven by small and medium-sized enterprises, where planning and reporting are often handled by the same department.
